St. Patrick’s Day

With our Irish last name, we of course attended St. Patrick’s Day activities last week. The parade and celebration at the State Historical Museum put me in touch with many warm, old acquaintances. [event specifics were given here.] Not that the people were old, but that I’ve known them for many years. Like this lovely person and this one, too.

This was also the day that I invited my in-laws (that Irish last name!) to our house for homemade shamrock shakes and a gift. The gift was purchased after we had some Abraham Lincoln activities (again at the state history museum) last month.We spent some time in the gift shop. Amazing how a small space can have so much stuff packed in it! I noticed three cardboard boxes of old maps. They were sitting on a table. No fancy display or sign; it was very humble. I’d probably walked by these boxes every time prior without browsing through them. I decided for whatever reason to give a look inside — the boxes were full of old maps.

I originally tried to find MY home place, but there were none from that county. After quite some time sorting through all of his county’s maps and two phone calls to a SIL, I found two maps from 1896 for my husband‘s childhood home — one larger and one smaller. I thought my in-laws would like the larger one for better readability, so I bought it, and left the smaller one.

Then I had remorse for not buying the small map and the large map. We have a room where we keep photos and artwork of places we’ve lived and visited, and the map I left behind would be great. The wall never looks ‘done,’ it’s always crooked, and I like it. I have two things waiting for frames to go up there as I type this. Anyway, I went back the next day and bought the small map. It has different information on it. We presented the maps on March 17 and let his parents choose one map for their house. We’d take the remaining map.